"The Most Popular Food at This Japanese 4th of July Party Is My Mother's Filipino Barbecue"

It was 1990-something and we were 35 miles south of Tokyo, in a little town called Atsugi. There was a naval air base there—“The Base,” we affectionately called it—and it was a little Americana haven that housed military families like ours. There was a bowling alley, a bakery, a department store—and on Independence Day, a massive party.

It was absolutely lit. The entire base would get decked out in red, white and blue. Out of nowhere, groups of people would start chanting USA! USA! USA! at the top of their lungs. It was as if somebody had set off one of those party poppers, and America itself had blasted out of it. For my family, who had arrived from a much less celebratory base in the Philippines, it was a bit jarring.

So we participated the only way we knew how: with barbecue.

There were myriad social clubs on The Base, and my family was quickly embraced by FILAM, the Filipino-American club. On the 4th, the clubs would set up food stalls on the soccer grounds. Each year my friends and I would do a loop of the field in the stifling humidity. We would see yakisoba and okonomiyaki, and of course there’d be hamburgers and hot dogs.

But the stall with the longest line was the one my parents were manning—the one selling skewers of meat that had spent the night in my mom’s famous Filipino marinade. The sweet garlic smell coming off the grill would entice seemingly everybody, and the line at the booth would grow as long as the Saturday morning line at Tartine.

The best way we knew to celebrate the country was to make the food that made us feel at home.

My mother’s marinade only has 4 ingredients: crushed pineapple juice, soy sauce, brown sugar and an unfathomable pile of garlic. But each of those ingredients has a special purpose. The pineapple juice is the meat tenderizer. The soy sauce is the brine. Brown sugar helps the fatty pieces of meat caramelize. And the garlic—well, the garlic is there for the flavor. That smell of it punches you in the face while the meat marinates overnight, but it mellows and even gets a little nutty once the skewers are grilled.

My dad, who manned the fire, could never keep up with demand. How could he? Many people would order 10 or 20 skewers at a time. It was a running joke on The Base that the most popular food at this Japanese 4th of July party was Filipino barbecue.

But it never seemed odd to me. And even now, 20 years later and living in San Francisco, my family still celebrates the 4th of July with those skewers. That smell of sweet garlic in the air reminds me of our time in Japan, when the best way we knew to celebrate the country was to make the food that made us feel at home.